No Good Very Bad Movies Special: The one that's the worst zombie movie

 

 

Title: Deadgirl

What Year?: 2008

Classification: Unnatural Experiment

Rating: Disqualified!!!

 

As I write this, it’s the middle of a week when I had been debating whether to blog at all. In the process, I have been trying to use the time to catch up or work ahead on certain projects. That brought me to a major loose end, a movie that I had looked into in the course of another feature and put into consideration as soon as I started this one. The difficulty I had never quite worked out was that after me one and only viewing, I had absolutely committed never to watch it again, a distinction even Creepers hadn’t “earned”. That kept me debating for a very long time what I could even do with it. In the end, I finally tried writing it up in a considerably different format, and only then was I sure that I had it in me to take it on in a full review. I present Deadgirl, my nomination for the worst zombie movie ever… kind of.

Our story begins with two teenagers, Rickie and JT, playing hookie to explore an abandoned mental institution. There, they discover a long-sealed room where an apparently living, completely unclothed woman is chained to a mattress. However, she doesn’t speak, her appearance is grungy and corrupted, and a few experiments confirm that she can survive any obvious conventional attack. Rickie wants to free her, but JT decides to abuse her carnally. Soon enough, the perv convinces several of their friends and frienemies to join in the fun. It leads to a gruesome death when the boyfriend of Rickie’s lady love gets bitten. JT remains more concerned that Deadgirl isn’t getting any fresher, so he sets out to find someone else to infect, and it just happens that the lady love is curious what all the fuss is about!

Deadgirl was a 2008 film by director Marcel Sarmiento and writer Trent Haaga. It was the only film produced by a company known as Hollywoodmade. The film starred Noah Segan as JT and Shiloah Fernandez as Rickie, with actress/ musician Candice King as the lady love Joann and model Jenny Spain in her first of two feature-length appearances as the Deadgirl. The soundtrack was scored by Joseph Bauer, with additional vocal tracks by artists including The Animal Collective and Black Summer Crush. The film was initially shown at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, followed by a limited US theatrical release in mid-2009. It was controversial among genre critics, with Peter Dendle describing it as “a disturbing study in human depravity (with) increasingly trite interpersonal teen power dynamics” in The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia Vol. 2. As of mid-2022, it is available for free streaming from VUDU.

For my experiences, what I find worth talking about is my taxonomy of “bad” zombie movies, already laid out through many rants in the course of The Revenant Review (see esp. Dead Heat and The Child). By my taxonomy, the true worsts of the genre are those that fail on a conceptual level, in one of two very different ways. The more typical are those that merely copy other films badly (especially those of Romero), for a product that is as intellectually dull as a bowling ball. The residuum are those that fixate on a concept that looks “original” but is really just offensively stupid. The paradox is that the latter are far more frustrating than the former, all the more so when they are made with minimum standards of technical quality. Of all the zombie movies I have considered, none embody this more than the present film. More than that, it truly made me mad, and thanks to my world’s-worst-superpower memory, I have had no trouble at all dissecting its flaws more than a year after my only viewing.

Moving forward, it would obviously be easy to condemn the film on moral grounds alone. In fact, while it can be said to meet a high standard of mediocrity, there’s plenty of faults, especially for a movie made in the modern era. The acting is average at best, saddled by inane and profane dialogue that made me give up on a new, very limited viewing after a few minutes. The story and plot are completely predictable despite a number of contrived “twists” with no onscreen explanation, to the point that I literally predicted the ending at least 20 minutes in advance. Then I still hold a special place in Hell for the music, which somehow left an extra bad impression after reviewing literally dozens of movies with 1970s synthesizer music. Meanwhile, the obvious problem, shared with Hard Rock Zombies, is that any ideas of comparative merit are stretched far beyond their limits. The only story we needed could have been told from what’s set up in the first 15 minutes: JT and Rickie find Deadgirl; JT wants to have his way with her; Rickie says it’s a bad idea; JT gets supernatural VD or something equally unpleasant. From there, one could fill out a TV episode or perhaps an under-90 quicky like Dr. Mordrid or The Day Time Ended. (Wait, I used both of those as “good” examples???) Instead, we have a cast of equally undeveloped and unlikeable characters whose shenanigans are drawn out to 101 minutes of running time, and the irritation factor grows exponentially for every minute over the hour mark.

That leads directly to where I cry foul. We can suspend disbelief for JT, who shows no trace of either empathy or rational self-interest. After all, he’s one of a sample of two, who were already willing to skip school to explore an abandoned building. There is further perverse fun to be had in his very strange dynamic with Rickie and the Deadgirl herself. It is here that we get the strongest sense of the revenant as a character, patient as much as passive, able and perhaps willing to take all manner of abuse with no more than vague irritation, until other developments unfold that may already be inevitable. But, again, any core of believability lies in how clearly abnormal this is. Things fall apart, hard, as soon as anyone else gives in to the supposed temptation, especially the one character specified to have a partner already. We still just might look at the posited dilemma differently if the Deadgirl was in any way attractive or at least apparently human and healthy. With the given parameters, however, even someone with the combined immorality of Howard Wallowitz and Glenn Quagmire wouldn’t touch this creature with a monomolecular prophylactic. Given that very obvious reality, everything that follows becomes one arbitrary contrivance after another.

That leaves the “one scene”, and that’s where I was out of options for avoiding watching this horrid little thing again. I decided I would try for a rematch with the soundtrack. What I went looking for was the worst offense, a track that had gone with a montage around the middle of the film. After careful cross-checking, I concluded that the odds were on a song called “Grace” by Super XX Man. I gave it a listen, twice, just to figure out if there was something about the song that could account for my bad reaction. It was quickly clear that, if it wasn’t in the scene I remembered, it was still by all means representative of the movie as a whole. On its own terms, it certainly isn’t “bad”; it’s just a slow, sad number with some quasi-religious overtones. But it was very easy to reconstruct just where it fits in a movie like this. It’s a moody, vaguely pretty bit of fluff, all the better to put a puerile locker room joke into a glossy, pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-introspective package. The bottom line is, even if the premises had been handled in a remotely tasteful or intellectually honest way, it would still be self-important teen angst that was done to death 10 years before this came out.

In closing, all I can say is that I’m truly relieved to get this done. Beyond that, I can point all the way back to when I started doing reviews for my reasons for doing this now. There is such a thing as immorally bad, and one would be hard-pressed to find a more egregious case than this. I have been all the more annoyed with those who seem intimidated into discussing it as “serious” horror. Sure, you can extract valuable insights from a very dumb idea, but unless the source can muster the potentially self-aware satire of Terrorvision or Plan 9 From Outer Space (damn right I’m using that as a good example), it remains just dumb. I, for one, have no trouble being the one to call this like it is. All I have to add is, watch something good.